This disclosure relates generally to social networking, and in particular to extending social content outside of a social networking system by personalizing an application with content from the social networking system.
In a typical social networking system, such as a social networking website, users set up their user profiles and then establish connections with other users of the social networking system. The users often provide information about themselves expressly to the social networking system, such as demographic information and/or a list of the users' interests. Users may also provide information about themselves implicitly to the social networking system, through their actions on the system and interactions with other users. In this way, a social networking system can obtain a rich set of social information about its users, which may be used in a great many ways to enhance a user's experience online.
However, most applications do not have access to this rich set of social information, and in fact most do not even know the identity of their users. Assembling enough information about a user's social connections for these purposes typically requires an application to interact with a large number of users over an extended period of time, and most applications do not have the resources, expertise, or user base required to build and maintain this social information. Accordingly, these applications will offer an inferior experience, since any customization or personalization provided by these applications is unlikely to reflect information about the user's social connections and their actions.
Accordingly, it would be beneficial to offer a mechanism to third-party applications, which are maintained by an entity that is different from a social networking system, to provide personalized content for their users based on social information about those users that is maintained by, or otherwise accessible to, the social networking system.